


Undead Poets Society

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ankh-Morpork Typical Cruelty to Animals, Lab Safety Violations, M/M, Mildly self-injurious stimming, My name is Elsinore and I'm convinced Havelock Vetinari was Patrician in the Colour of Magic, School, Teaching, Temporary Character Death/Character Undeath, The character Rye has no pronouns only zombie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:19:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26259298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: Months before the assassination of Lord Snapcase, life in the Assassins Guild is business as usual, for a certain value of business as usual
Relationships: Lord Downey/Havelock Vetinari
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9





	Undead Poets Society

**Author's Note:**

> This kind of ran away with me... It just sort of happened 
> 
> ...And then the file got lost and I tried to rewrite it from memory which was frustrating

The shark had followed a ship headed for the tannery in Morpork in from the saltier estuary further out from the city. On the crowded river, sailors, alarmed and frightened by the large animal and its rows upon rows of teeth were attempting to run it through with spears and swords. 

Havelock Vetinari, from a perch halfway up the edifice of one of the city’s smaller banks—that is, financial banks, which in this case happened to be situated on the riverbank—looked on with dismay. The shark was being quickly poisoned by the water—even if it wasn’t poisonous to most lifeforms, the lack of salt would have killed the ocean fish.

He leapt down to street level in a billow of dark cloak sure to catch any eye turned in that direction and landed silent on the narrow ledge that rather optimistically sought to use the Ankh as a canal. 

“Friends, Morporkians, Seafarers and various combinations thereof— Do you want some help over there?”

There were murmurs throughout the crowd that ranged from “It’s him! ‘Tax the rat farms!’ The clever one.” to “Snapcase calls him ‘Petulia’ because he’s... you know...”

The Assassin waited patiently and then asked again, his voice carrying over the water, “Do you want someone to take care of the shark?”

The fat young man moved like a dancer and the more experienced fighters recognized terrifying strength in the slow elegance with which he went from ledge to freighter to ferry along the gunwales, seeming to travel along the air rather than on wood over water. After crossing half a dozen ships and small boats he arrived at where the shark, impaled, bleeding and poisoned, thrashed, damaging the nearest hulls. 

“Sharks communicate visually,” Havelock said, and the sailors who had been throwing things at the shark found themselves nodding along. “They can’t emit any vocal sounds, but specific communication and challenging behaviors have been observed. I would like to wish her peace and to not be perceived as a threat as she dies, but here’s the thing—" Vetinari looked around with a raised eyebrow and a flash of teeth, “If you’re a shark non-threatening is _neutral._ Do youunderstand? You attacked a dying animal that evolved communication for the primary purpose of competing without maiming or killing. You caused a creature smart enough to know how to consciously _warn_ to die in unnecessary pain.”

Vetinari pulled the spear out of the shark and handed it to the person who had thrown it. Then he pulled the dead six-foot shark out of the water and carried it across his shoulders to the shore. 

Downey was teaching GCAE biology. Not having to hear him complain about how horribly the class was going was worth being covered in the waters of the Ankh (dead fish wasn’t worth mentioning by comparison).

Only two students in the GCAE class had eaten preserved frogs eyes and only one of the second years had been stabbed through the hand with scissors. The jury was still out on the third years spraying caustic chemicals into their eyes. 

Downey spun the empty coffee cup on his desk around on the stain on the wood. Several years ago dark mold had eaten into the desk where spills had worn away the finish and subsequently died, leaving a mark almost indistinguishable from an ink stain. He glanced out the window and saw someone with a hood pulled low over his face carefully arranging a large fish—specifically an Ankh Estuary shark—on a wooden cart. A lucky catch, he thought, the sharks were more edible than most things in the Ankh. 

“The river hasn’t got tides! It’s a river! Only the ocean’s got tides. Teacher, tell Ahmad that he’s wrong,” whined a thirteen-year-old Cosmo Lavish. It took a special kind of person, Downey considered, to refer to your teachers as “teacher” when you were a teenager. Most of them just called him ‘Downey’ with no honorific.

“I was _saying_ ,” Ahmad continued, spilling a small amount of hydrochloric acid onto the countertops, “that the height of the river changes by over twenty feet twice a day, which you would notice if you ever went outside.”

Downey stole another glance out the window and recognized the pattern of velvet on the robe of the person dragging the fish on the cart. Then he knelt by the cabinet to try to find out what the teacher the previous hour had done with the sodium bicarbonate.

Lord Vetinari waited until the class was almost over before knocking on the door. There was the collective swiveling of heads that occurs whenever anyone opens a classroom door followed by the oohs and ahhs and ‘oh no gross' of any group of thirteen-year-olds presented with a dead shark. 

“Was it harpooned like a whale?” Chrysanthos asked, staring into the wound in its back. “Did you kill it?”

“Oh no, it was dead in the river. I just brought it back for dissection.”

Over the top of the shark Downey silently mouthed the words ’thank you.’ If he didn’t know better he’d think the shrug of the shoulders Vetinari gave was less a ‘figurati’ and more a little dance of happiness.

Downey met the next class in the hallway. It was really one hallway that ran the length of the building if you thought of the Assassins Guild and the Fools Guild as two U’s opening towards each other. Funny that, two U’s.

“What is the mark of a successful Assassin?” he asked the assembled students.

Rye raised a hand. For a time Downey had thought Rye was a girl in disguise, but Rye has been quick to dispel that notion. 

“The inimitable M. Rye?”

“Money?” 

“Yes, but many of you have that already,” Downey said, to the accompaniment of some giggles. Rhythm, that was what it took, say it at the right rate and anything’s a laugh line. 

“Fame?” Pierce suggested.

“Look down this corridor. Look at the large memorials. Look at the small ones. Tell me what you notice.”

“No one I’ve ever heard of has a memorial bigger than quarto-sized paper.” Waris had noticed this many years back, asked for explanation and been rebuffed.

“Mr Waris, right on the money, which, as we have ascertained, is not the success we deserve, but the one we need right now.” 

“Real notoriety is organic,” Waris realized. “It’s not just a convoluted, antiquated custom, it’s pretty straightforward symbolism.”

“I’d still like a big trophy though,” Pierce said, reading the name of some long-forgotten merchant who had been killed two years ago embossed in solid gold, “just to have as a really flash paperweight, you know?”

“A successful Assassin takes pride in the art. The valuable metric of success is how much you care about the work and how dedicated you are to improving. Everything else is happenstance.”

“Isn’t how much you can care also a factor of happenstance?” Sierra was tall and gloomy and at times startlingly goofy, reminding Downey painfully of Vetinari.

“Yes. But never underestimate the importance of choice and conviction. They can see you through.”

“It stinks like Ankh in here,” Rye said brightly. 

“It does, at that. I’ve got something for you lot to dissect.”

“It had better not be another journal article,” Sierra said. He had grown rather bored of the word ‘dissect’ being used figuratively. You don’t become an Assassin to quibble over sentence structure.

“I think you’ll enjoy it. I want lots of sketches.”

Downey decided to take all his classes on a field trip. If it was true that some of the third years hadn’t had the chance to see the change in the river level over the course of the day, it was doubly true that the second years needed to feel more comfortable navigating the city and triply true that the eighteen-year-olds needed to remember to relax and breathe. 

The Arena of the Patrician was a three-story coliseum surrounded by a racetrack. During decades when it wasn’t in use it was a popular place to walk in the evenings. During decades when it was, well, Snapcase had once thrown a section of the audience to the lions because he got bored.

Taking more than, say, five students anywhere felt like herding cats. Downey found himself moving to keep them all in view, scanning for potential threats. 

He stopped moving. “Where is Pierce?” 

Sierra pointed to a spot three-quarters of the way up the coliseum. “Up there.”

“Good eye.”

“That, friends, is why we study visual art.”

“Well, as I’ve told your professor on a number of occasions, I physically could not tell if the Emperor of Überwald was hanging off my ceiling fan in the middle of the night.”

“Rooms in the Guild don’t have ceiling fans.” Waris was trying apply directly to the school of Medicine and Applied Pathology and had made a thorough survey of rooms available to doctoral students.

“There you are then.”

Chrysanthos who had been watching crows landing on the top of the coliseum gave a piercing scream.

“He’s fallen! He was trying to stand on the top of the wall!”

Downey permitted himself a sigh before sprinting across the street to the fallen Assassin. He would say this job was giving him grey hair, except that it manifestly already had.

He felt his blood run cold. The boy’s neck was broken. 

A shape stepped out of the shadows and Downey jumped.

“Don’t _do_ that, Dog Botherer.”

“There’s spinal cord damage. I’m going to see if Reg Shoe can find a vampire.”

“You can’t turn someone into a vampire without their consent.”

Vetinari silently held out a folded piece of paper in Pierce’s handwriting. It was a poem titled ‘Ye Vampyre.’

Downey read a few lines. “Do you think he did it on purpose?” 

Vetinari shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“He was under a lot of pressure. Many of the students in that class were looking to go into medicine, but I don’t think—“

In the group of younger students someone began sobbing, loudly.

In a moment, Vetinari was half-kneeling to be eye-level with the crying boy. “What’s your name?”

“Cosmo Lavish.”

“You’re not taking the Black Syllabus, are you?”

Cosmo shook his head.

“Are you upset because Pierce is dead?”

Cosmo shook his head again.

“Just tired and scared? I feel that.” Vetinari twisted one of his rings off of his finger, a large ruby, so pink as to be almost purple. “How about you look after that for me?”

“Havelock, that’s your money, don’t give him that,” Downey said.

“He’s a scared child.”

“He’s paying three times more to go here than you see in a year.”

Vetinari ignored this. “The Lavishes run the bank, don’t they? So did the Vetinaris, but we failed.”

“Havelock, if he loses that ring you’ll have no—“

“Must dash. Have a vampire to find.”

Mr Honeyplace, of Slant, Morecombe and Honeyplace, wanted nothing to do with Assassins. They tended to reduce the number of potential clients. 

But Reg Shoe wanted a vampire who who knew what they were doing when it came to transforming humans and most of the vampires in Ankh-Morpork had no experience with that kind of thing. He probably wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if he hadn’t recited Pierce’s poem. It spoke to the lore and the law in a way that could hardly fail to resonate with someone who was an important part in making Ankh-Morpork what it was, even as Patricians and, further back, kings, had undermined the rule of law.

Pierce wanted to be a vampire and Honeyplace had arrived just in time.

Reg Shoe had found a room in an empty office building where Pierce could recover without having to transport him all the way back to the Assassins Guild.

“He’ll need blood when he wakes up, to finish healing,” Honeyplace said, pulling on his coat. He wouldn’t tell Slant and Morecombe what he had done. So there was one more vampire in the world? So be it.

Pierce opened his eyes. Some vampires did have red eyes, most did not. Pierce had the grey eyes he had described in his poem. Grey like stone, not the blue people referred to as grey.

“You know the last line of ‘Gather Ye Rosebuds’ is ‘You may forever tarry?’” Pierce rasped.

Vetinari pushed up his sleeve and held out a round forearm. Veins didn’t stand out anymore, but that didn’t matter. He looked out the window at the coliseum. “I’m going to have that thing torn down.”

Pierce tried to make the sign for ‘why?’ without moving away from Vetinari’s arm.

“Because it’s horrible. Yes, I know it’s hundreds of years old, but that’s no excuse.”

Once his heart had begun to beat again, Pierce sat up and wiped his mouth. “Professor Vetinari?”

“Yes?”

“What did you use to do that?” Pierce pointed. The shape of a pentagram was lightly scraped onto the skin near the bite mark.

“Oh. Sharpened pencil.”

“You put a holy symbol on yourself with a wooden stake?”

“I didn’t know you were going to fling yourself off the top of a building! I was just... messing with my skin... because... understimulated.”

“That’s fair.”

“How’s being a vampire?”

“Feels good. Feels normal.”

Vetinari looked at the artificial plant at the end of the couch which seemed to be an integral part of an office building. Not unlike a strange smelling water cooler. The couch itself was made out of some kind of horrible woven fabric he was sure seventy percent of people were allergic to. He had given a substantial amount of blood. Cataloging the scenery was generally not the best sign.

He must have nodded off because the next thing he knew, Downey was pressing a piece of a ginger biscuit to his mouth.

“Eat.”

“Yes. Okay. What’s happening?”

“We’re having a crisis. Snapcase hired someone to take out Rye while we were guarding the building.”

Vetinari felt like ‘stale biscuit with crystallized ginger’ shouldn’t taste like ‘harmonica and washboard.’ It was too jaunty. “One of ours?” he asked.

“I’m afraid so. But Rye has taken black, it’s all...” Downey paused as though he could smell lingering lawyerliness in the room, “It’s all legal.”

“Whom?”

“Who, not whom.” Vetinari smirked at the correction. “It was Urmond."

“I really wish Follett wasn’t ill. He sort of vetted things.”

“He sort of vetted things because your aunt made him.”

“Who do you think will take over?”

Downey shrugged. “No idea.”

Zlorf Flannelfoot was not poisoning Dr Follett. As a rule Flannelfoot did not bother with things that couldn’t be classified as ranged or melee. Slow-acting poison felt like evidence of a cold, passionless universe.

The most likely successors to Dr Follett were Dr Cruces and Lord Vetinari. One was academically inclined, soft-spoken, odd, dramatic, terrifying and the other was Lord Vetinari. 

He knew the best chance of rising to high office came from avoiding pitch-matching. Making the question “what do I want” not “who will do it better.”

Zlorf knew his chances of becoming head of the Guild depended on keeping Vetinari in the hypothetical running for as long as possible. For Vetinari was a star in the ascendant, become a name, a part of all that he has met, and no one would look at Cruces as long as Vetinari was in the room.

In the office building there came a tapping as of someone gently rapping at the chamber door.

“It is some visitor,” Vetinari said, waving a beringed hand.

“We are wanted men,” Downey protested.

“Only this and nothing more.”

With trepidation Downey opened the door to see—

Rye, a knife still stuck between ribs, face the grim mask of rigor mortis.

“Downey, how long was I asleep?” Vetinari said quietly, knowing the answer almost to the minute from the state of the zombie.

“Here student! Dear child! It is some dream that on the deck, you’ve fallen cold and dead,” Downey recited.

Rye does not answer.

“It’s an oscillation of the vocal folds. You move them together to create an air pressure differential. Have you got breathing figured out?”

Rye’s head moves side to side. This takes a lot of thought. Nodding would have been easier, a simple contraction and relaxation of muscles.

“Intercostal muscles move the rib cage up as the diaphragm contracts, increasing the volume of the thoracic cavity. Exhalation is then elastic although the abdominal muscles can pull the ribs back down.”

After some trial and error, Rye managed to produce sound “Can I still be an Assassin?”

“If you pass the rest of your exams.”

Dr. Follett objected to the death and resurrection of two students in Downey’s class.

Zlorf Flannelfoot was arguing with him because he feared that not only Downey, but Vetinari as well would be expelled from the Guild.

“Zombies are a natural occurrence in a high level standing magical field.”

“Do you think physical immortality in any way allows for a fair playing field in a game the crux of which is death?” Follett was sitting up stiffly in what he knew to be his deathbed "They have inherent advantages over the living. How would clients have a fighting chance?” 

“Doctor, with all due respect, with advantages come vulnerabilities. For example,” Zlorf drew in breath, “among my ancestors are lowland trolls, adapted to temperatures as sweltering as sixteen degrees above freezing, who could turn away most bladed weapons, but with that comes photosensitive petrification. You knew this when I was admitted as a student. Why should vampires and zombies be any different just because they’re not alive? We are on the same field. It’s called the world.” 

“I maintain that Liam Downey should not have facilitated a situation resulting in the deaths of two students in one day. Writing poetry? Really? There must be consequences.”

Whoever actually was poisoning Follett, Zlorf thought, had done thorough work. He’d never been this cranky and close-minded in the past. 

Rye was gradually acquiring, if not muscle memory, then spirit memory for moving around and talking. Rye decided to keep the knife, after sewing up the hole between ribs on Reg Shoe’s advice. Sharpening a pen with it, Rye sat down to write about the first day of the rest of Rye’s existence.

“Hey,” Pierce said, silently stepping into the empty classroom.

“Are you staying?” Rye’s voice was dry and hollow, though Pierce suspected it was an affectation.

“I think I want to graduate, if they’ll let me.”

“And then?”

“Tis not too late to seek a newer world… though much is taken, much abides… that which we are, we are.”

“Have you talked to Reg?”

Pierce shook his head. “Not really. I know what I want.”

“I’m staying here,” Rye said and Pierce realized if that Rye were a ghost Rye would find a way to be bound the stones of the Assassins Guild. “I know it sounds strange, because things aren’t good here, but it’s the first place I felt safe. The first place I felt like myself without limits.”

“You wouldn’t even complain about the food,” Pierce remembered.

“Why would I? The food was good.”

Trying for some mundane gossip, Pierce said “Have you noticed the way Downey and Vetinari look at each other? Like they’re playing Kiss, Marry, Kill with only one option?”

“Pierce?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think we can get into the Selachii’s Hogswatch Eve party?”

“The Selachiis that we see literally every day?” 

Vetinari knew that this year it was important to attend practically the full Season of society parties. He wasn’t looking forward to it. Two or three parties were fine, but beyond that he got restless, itched to be able to write, to curl up in the corner and pin down what he was thinking, annoyed with people asking him why he wasn’t drinking, or shocked to see him take a glass, without knowing that he had already had two or three. 

Try as he might to oppose and reason with them, the social mores of major religions had wound themselves into his brain. The Omnians and followers of Blind Io were locked in debate as to whether melancholy was the result of spiritual imbalance or personal failure and willful refusal to accept joy. He could see clearly enough that envy and pride were opposites, and avarice and rage opposed to sloth, but being out of the shot and danger of all five of those seemed to indicate that you were running along a very different track than most people and therefore equally wrong. There was a sound moral argument against taking more when it meant others had less, and conspicuous consumption as a status symbol, but some theologians bizarrely extended the argument to claim the most sinful gluttony was taking a reasonable amount of the simplest food with too much pleasure. One thing some religions, and the culture around them, were extremely good at was convincing you that your emotions were morally wrong. 

A twice-a-year Offlerian with whom you were conversing at a party might agree completely with this sentiment, but wouldn’t want to talk about it near anything metal or bodies of water, knowing that there was a chapter in your dissertation titled “Not Collecting Pins is Not A Hobby.”

Some of the parties were dances, to which he was expected to bring a partner. A few years back, after mutually deciding that a marriage of convenience would be unhelpful and unnecessary, Lady Sibyl Ramkin had stopped accepting his invitations to such events. This was perfectly reasonable, but left him at rather a loss. Who could he ask? Rosie Palm would laugh at him. Asking any of the women in the Guild got complicated. Lady Margolotta? Havelock looked into the rust-speckled mirror in the bathroom and sighed. 

Walking behind him, Downey flicked the curtain of black hair that fell past Vetinari’s shoulders. “You doing well?”

“Who should I ask to the Selachii’s?”

“That lady in Überwald. What’s-her-name.”

“She’s practically the ruler of a country. I am a random postdoc.”

“You’re the only Assassin in living memory whose first kill, not only doesn’t have a memorial painting, but no record at all.”

“Second commission. Technically fourth kill.”

“You can’t be timid about consorting with rulers,” Downey wasn’t sure what was really wrong, but he could deal with what was happening on the surface.

“You know perfectly well it’s the consorting that’s the issue, not the rulers.”

Looking at Havelock, Liam occasionally felt overcome with a fierce, protective love that seemed at odds with the younger man’s presentation of himself as unassailable. Admittedly, for the first decade of their acquaintance, the person Havelock needed protecting from was Downey. There was no way to fully rectify that.

“How necessary is it?”

“Hmm?”

“You can tell which way the wind is blowing. How important is it that you don’t show up alone? Or...”

“Liam I would ask you, of course, but two of your students are scheming to get us together and I’d hate to disappoint them.”

Downey dropped the bar of soap he was holding in surprise. “I thought— I thought this was about— Then why do you look so upset? You don’t have to do anything just because students—“

“My unhappiness is allowed nebulous causality. Do not take my emotional state personally.” 

What Downey wanted to do, teaching the unit on the preparation of poisonous plants, was, of course, to take the class to the place in the city where they could find them, but that had been expressly forbidden. So he restlessly rearranged specimens of pressed and preserved plants. He’d worried since he first began teaching that he wasn’t able to make what he cared about as interesting to students as it was to him. Passion did not seem to be enough. 

He recalled having teachers who, though clearly having a great time, spoke facing the board and skipped necessary pieces of explanation. 

The farthest, to give a random example not at all indicative of how much time time Downey spent thinking about him, Havelock Vetinari got in mathematics was the calculus of infinitesimals at which point he claimed he kept focusing on the instructor’s speech patterns and how she put sentences together and got totally lost in the weeds of the actual equations. Consequently, no matter how much information vegetable, animal and mineral, hard acrostics, paradoxes and elegiac quotes he acquired, Lord Vetinari must admit to being very bad at integral and differential calculus. But if you ever DID need a washing bill written in Tsortian cuneiform...

That wouldn’t be his students. They wouldn’t be in an environment where their pride prevented them from asking from asking for help. Not a dark lecture hall where no one would notice that you were staring at the wall trying to determine the chemical composition of the bricks. He would make the stories of foxglove, oleander, belladonna, yew and hemlock work for him. The dense mythology that adhered to poisons like a clinging vine. 

“Do you actually think the lords and ladies brought digitalis to this world?” Ahmad wanted to know, “Surely there are other plants closely related to it? If it happened because a Llamedosian prince offered one of them cheese, the species must have spread really quickly to be found everywhere it is found today.”

“Despite this,” Downey indicated his grey hair, “I was not actually alive in the Century of Two Mice. What do you think?”

“I think the god of evolution is not as creative as he likes to think he is.”

Downey’s “what do you think”s were said with a smile that said ‘I could give you answer, but I know exactly what I am doing.’

At the end of class Cosmo tried to give him Vetinari’s ring. The stone, almost but not quite a pigeon blood ruby, was worth three years wages. Downey wasn’t sure if it was something Vetinari had been given, found, stolen or bought. 

“Maybe he’s hoping to accrue interest on it.”

“What if it gets stolen?”

“If it’s stolen, that’s between Vetinari and the thieves.”

“Are you sure you can’t just give it to him?”

“You’re not very interested in being a banker, are you?” 

Cosmo shook his head. “Teacher?”

“Yes?”

“People were saying Vetinari is a witch.” It was the first time Downey had heard Cosmo call an instructor surname-no-honorific.

“Who was saying that?”

“His students.”

“In that case I can neither confirm nor deny.”

Everyone knew now that Pierce and Rye were undead. They’d never previously considered actually going up to the Selachiis about events to which the aristocracy had standing invitations. 

“You should do it,” Rye said. “Vampires have a relationship with the nobs in this city.”

“But I don’t.”

“No, but you can play the part. You’re a good actor.”

“They know you better, Rye.”

“We’re talking about a dozen people. Who are we going to ask?”

“Remora.”

“Who is Remora married to?”

“I don’t remember.”

Rye exhaled like wind blowing across a coffin, “Cleary neither of us know them very well.”

“I suppose there’s no harm in trying.”

“You’d think in our profession we’d stop saying things like that.”

“At our time of death?”

A zombie’s laugh is a distinctly unsettling sound.

In Ankh, when winters were particularly bitter, mild, cold, warm, wet or dry, they tended to celebrate Hogswatch from two months before the actual date. Houses were bedecked with ribbons and wreathes. This year they blew in the wind and were torn from archways and had to be caught and kept from rolling down the street and turning into huge festive tumbleweeds. 

“You know how I’m usually bothered by seasonal decorations?”

“I think you’re just bothered by decorations full stop, Dog-Botherer.”

“ _Anyway,_ I find somehow I’m fond of Hogswatch. There’s something effably nostalgic about it.”

They watched men with long poles putting up a rowboat-sized replacement wreath on the facade of the Café Ankh.

“Don’t you mean ineffably?”

“You question my powers of explication?”

“You don’t celebrate Hogswatch. You’ve never spent it with your family. You don’t like pies. You work all night. You—“

Vetinari reached into the bag of peppermint humbugs Downey was holding. “You’re wrong about the pies.”

“You’re making yourself quite quietly popular.”

Vetinari touched the side of his nose “Nonthreatening. People have to think I can be swayed, controlled, flattered, but not by fools and not by people they don’t agree with. You can get some of the people to love you all of the time and all of the people to fear you some of the time. Now is a time to be loved. No one will believe that you can prove yourself indispensable until you do so.”

“Happy Hogswatch.”

“It’s still Ember.”

Remora Selachii claimed to have been intending to invite Pierce and Rye to the party. They weren’t sure how far to believe this.

Assassins were well-provided when it came to knowing what to wear to parties. Timeless or bleeding edge, Assassins were always fashionable. 

Pierce, used to the Guild uniform of the first three years, felt most comfortable in breeches and a knee-length coat. He looked like an old-school vampire, with a high collar and lace falling from the neck. Rye wore a three-piece suit with a sprig of dead flowers, lilies and orchids.

They weren’t sure if Lord Vetinari’s expected date, Lady Margolotta was actually going to show. They were equally unsure how that would affect their plan. 

The Selachiis place was an iteration of marble and gilt opulence more tasteful than most, evidently moderated by hundreds of arguments over hundreds of years. 

Pierce turned away an offer of a flute of champagne, knowing the zombie couldn't take one. 

Would Vetinari make an entrance or just appear in the midst of the crowd? Downey would come through the front door like a normal person.

The strains of a string quartet washed over the room. Someone in a three-quarter mask with spirals of gold painted on black was dancing in a zig-zag pattern across the floor. They seemed to have their eyes closed.

Liam Downey arrived twenty minutes late, in true Assassin style. 

Remora Selachii watched the scene with folded arms. He was an Assassin almost more by default than anything else. He saw it as business, not as art.

“The balance of probability,” Pierce whispered, “is that Vetinari is already in the room.”

The zombie and vampire turned to the person in the mask. They wore a black robe and had black hair tied in a knot at the back of their head. 

“A bit obvious, don’t you think?”

“You mean all he’d have to do was wear a color and no one would recognize him?”

Rye walked up and tapped him on the shoulder. He opened his eyes. “Why don’t you ask someone to dance?”

“Do you want to dance?”

“I’m a zombie. It takes a lot of, well, not brain power, but, you know…”

“Would you like a crystallized starfish?” with expert sleight of hand the starfish appeared from nowhere.

“I’m a zombie.”

“Of course. My apologies.”

Rye found it a relief to be offered food that wasn’t actually appealing. Rye considered that the lore probably allowed zombies, if they really wanted to, to eat cervelle de veau or the heads of squids or other brain food, but for the most part corpses couldn’t eat.

“How about asking— Do you see the man over there in the leather greatcoat, with wavy grey hair?”

“I do see him.”

It occurred to Rye that Vetinari was playing along, and letting Rye know that he was doing so. Rye walked back to Pierce, exaggerating the overthought zombie gait.

The man in the mask seemed to disappear for a moment and then Downey heard a low voice in his ear. 

“I suppose I should wait until later in the evening, but is it not written that the diurnal bird catches the annelid?”

Downey looked at the floor. “Why yes, you may have this dance.”

Vetinari was an excellent dancer. Downey found he always expected a degree of back-leading if Vetinari was following, which was probably mostly because Downey felt like he didn’t know what he was doing. Vetinari would also do things like make up steps and move on the offbeat. 

“This feels like a last dance.”

Vetinari felt a chill climb up his spine as he realized what Downey said was true. In a few months his world would be much simpler and much more complicated. 

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a figure in pink and black enter the room. “Margolotta’s here.” 

“Feel like you need to go distract her?”

Vetinari lay a finger on Downey’s lips for a fraction of a second. “I am here and yet not here.”

“Perhaps we should be and not be somewhere else.”

Vetinari stopped moving. “What kind of somewhere else?”

“I know this house. We could go sit and talk somewhere.”

“I might be okay with the other kind of somewhere else.”

Keeping hold of Vetinari’s hand, Downey led him to the nearest window. “There’s a guest bedroom on the third floor.”

Havelock looked up the wall. “Solid limestone masonry? I’m almost insulted.”

“Have to start the kiddie Assassins off somewhere.”

“Makes sense.”

In a matter of minutes they were climbing through the window of the turnwise guest bedroom. Havelock sat on the bed and kicked off his boots. His socks had grey heels and toes.

“You know I haven’t ever kissed anyone before.”

“Have you wanted to?” Downey asked.

“We’ve been through this. I don’t know.”

Downey looked at the floor. There was a pattern of very unrealistic grape vines on the carpet. “Sometimes I think I want you so much it hurts.”

“That sounds horrible.” 

“Mostly I just want you safe.”

“That ought to be moving, but it just sounds equally horrible.”

“I think I’m actually in love with you.”

Havelock pulled his feet up onto the bed, rumpling the weird velvet blanket thing that looked like a table runner. “I’m really trying to think of something to say that isn’t flippant, but I’m nervous and emotional and being nervous and emotional results in incorrigible glibness.” 

“May I kiss you?”

Vetinari put his head in his hands, palm to forehead. “If you’d said ‘can I’ I would have said ‘I don’t know, can you?’”

“I know.”

“You may kiss me.”

Liam climbed onto the bed, Havelock moved so his back was against the headboard. Liam put his hands on either side of his face.

“Your hands are so warm.” 

Downey tasted like the F major chord on a guitar, the purple-green fluorescent blue color of fluorspar, the physical sensation of a perfect hiding place and traces of lingering peppermint. 

Vetinari’s face and lips were chapped from standing outside in the wind. They tasted like nothing because people generally don’t.

Vetinari wrapped his arms around Downey and kissed him back, hard.

Downey gave a sort of moan and pushed Vetinari’s shoulders back against the tall headboard. “This could go on for quite a while.”

“Yes, I rather think it might.”

After about half an hour, Rye was able to wrest Pierce away from Lady Margolotta.

“What did she want?”

“Something about playing piano. I’m thinking maybe I could do a musical adaptation of Vetinari’s God Studies dissertation.”

“Why are so many people obsessed with him?” Rye wondered, a tremor in the hollow dead voice, knowing Rye was no exception.

“I already have the chords worked out for ’Not Collecting Pins Is Not A Hobby.’”


End file.
